In the modern world there are many different incredibly large infrastructures that span across nations, and sometimes even across continents. The United States in particular has some of the largest infrastructures in the world. These infrastructures serve many different purposes that are crucial to modern life, such as communications, transportation, power distribution, clean water distribution, and waste disposal. These infrastructures make much of modern life possible. For example cities would be nearly impossible to maintain without proper transportation and waste disposal networks. Waste disposal is of particular importance. In the past, waste in cities was simply dumped out into the streets; trash, detritus, and even human waste collected on the streets, creating a potent hazard to public health. In the modern world, waste disposal infrastructure ensures that trash and human wastes are properly handled and disposed of such that they do not collect in public spaces.
Transportation infrastructures in the United States allow citizens to cover distances that would otherwise take hours or even days by foot. The vast and winding road network present in the United States allows citizens to travel by motor vehicle with great speed. This enables for rapid distribution of goods by private companies, vacation travel by private citizens, and disaster response by the military and the government.
The communications infrastructure in the United States is also highly important, allowing people to transmit ideas and instructions from one side of the country to the other nearly instantaneously. Radio towers dot the country, covering it in a vast net of wireless communications coverage. This enables people to communicate with one another even when they do not have access to a landline communications device. Devices known as cell phone have become the most prevalent and dominant form of communication in the country; some people do not even maintain a landline telephone anymore, as a cell phone can fulfill all of their communication needs. One of the reason cell phones are so dominant in the modern world is because they are capable not only of accessing radio tower networks for voice communication, but also of connecting to the internet via radio towers. The internet allows for near instantaneous transmission of information, the applications of which are far too numerous to list here, however perhaps the most common use of the internet is to allow users to access what are known as websites to obtain information about certain topics or carry out certain functions such as purchasing an item. Because of these advantages, the value of the different infrastructures found in the United States is very apparent, and modern life would simply not be the same without them.
All infrastructures, no matter how advanced, must be maintained and sometimes expanded through the constant hard work of trained employees. These trained employees are responsible for travelling to locations where physical components of the infrastructure are present and performing preventative maintenance or repairs on those physical locations. As a result of this fact, these employees are sometime referred to as field workers. For example, a field worker for a telecommunications company may be required to travel to a damaged cell tower and affect repairs. As most of these infrastructures are used by a vast number of people, they are of great importance, and all work performed on infrastructure elements must be held up to certain standards. These standards may be set by the company that owns that element of the infrastructure, or they may be set by the government to ensure safety of citizens utilizing the infrastructure. As a result of this fact, field workers are often required to submit what is known as a field report or field daily. These field reports document that the work has been completed, and that the work has been completed to the required industry standards.
Currently, field daily reports are often submitted via email. The field worker completes all necessary forms and prepares all necessary files and then emails all of those forms and files to the intended recipient, which is typically the company which owns the infrastructure element that was worked on. This method does accomplish the desired goal of delivering the field daily report and required files to the intended recipient, however it is rather inefficient. One reason for this inefficiency is the fact that often times the digital size of the files exceeds the maximum amount that can be sent in one email. This requires the field worker to compose and send multiple different emails just to close out one field task that they performed. Furthermore, email clients can be insufficient to properly organize the field daily report and its required files. This means that should the company wishes to revisit those files, it can be difficult to find them amid the mass of emails that were received on that particular date. The process of submitting field reports and files by email can be both time consuming and frustrating, and the method of submission can also be frustrating for the recipient as it is time consuming to properly archive data contained in files received by email.
In response to the difficulties described above, it is an object of the present technology to create a system and method of submitting daily field reports (potentially from the field and in real time). It is a further object of the present technology to allow files to be uploaded directly to a website that can be later accessed by client companies who download the files needed to close out a case. The present technology can also be used to implement a system capable of storing field report forms and files for a specific company for an extended period of time, as well as organizing these files and notifying supervisors when new files are uploaded or existing files are downloaded.